A Proposal: 중앙대 법학원 2층

[kellogg]

No, not THAT kind of proposal! (That's an interesting example of an English word mapped onto a Korean word meaning!) It's a very healthy proposal, as they say in the advertisements for organic food. It's a kind of tradition, in our Whole Language Class, that on the last day of the midterm, the professor takes you all out to dinner. We usually go over to Norbu's across the street, and sit in the little alcove, and eat smoked duck and kimchi and drink good wine.

HOWEVER, this time I have a different idea. You see, Merrill Swain is in town. Now, in order to explain to you what that means, I have to indulge in some shameless (because heartfelt) flattery.  Whenever I want to know what I will be thinking in five or ten years time, I just go read the articles of Merrill Swain. There aren't very many of them, because she's a very careful writer. But just about every single one of them has made a major difference, not just in the way I think, but in the way people think about English teaching in general.

In 1980 (!) she wrote an article with Michael Canale which tried to "operationalize" the construct of communicative competence for the first time: she divided it into sociolinguistic, discourse, grammatical and strategic competence. This approach was later taken to a ridiculous extreme by Lyle Bachman, but that's not her fault. She was trying to make it measurable and studiable.

In 1985, she wrote an article by herself which argued (at a time when this was really NOT fashionable) that Krashen was wrong: comprehensible input is NOT the necessary and sufficient condition for foreign language acquisition. She used the immersion studies (in which she has been involved from the very outset) as the crux of her argument, and her conclusions were (to me, anyway) irrefutable. Not content with refuting Krashen, she argued for the role of "comprehensible output" (which Krashen called, rather uncharitably, "forced output") as a way of getting children to switch from a purely lexical to a more grammatical approach.

On Sunday, Jisu BRAVELY bearded Merrill Swain and asked her about the "grammar in, lexis out" problem, that is, the problem we ALL have with kids who listen to so-called "comprehensible input", give every indication of comprehending it, and then reply in one or two virtually grammarless words. This is essentially the problem Merrill Swain tackled with the "Output Hypothesis".

In 1990 Merrill Swain published, with Birgit Harley, Jim Cummins, and Patrick Allen, a book none too modestly titled "The Development of Second Language Proficiency". This was the definitive word on the immersion program in Canada. But it was also the last word on Merrill Swain's work with Canale on a hypothetical structure for communicative competence; the different components she'd theorized were not statistically independent, so she  (eventually) rejected this approach. In some ways, her rejection of the approach was even more important than her formulation of it.

In 1995, Merrill Swain wrote an article for a festschrift for my old professor H.G. Widdowson in which she argued that "ouput" had (at least) three key functions not to be found in so-called "comprehensible input" based theories (including the "modified interaction" theories of Long and Robinson which later gave birth to "focus on form"). First, she said, output has a "notice the gap", consciousness raising role; we notice that the way we say things isn't the same way as the way we hear things being said, and we try to do something about it. This wasn't new in itself, because Schmidt was arguing pretty much the same thing, but it dovetailed with other important Swainian ideas, such as "locus of control", the idea that you understand more when you can intervene and control input, and later, collaborative dialogue.

Second, she said, comprehensible output has a "hypothesis testing" role; for example, children learn that you can put LOTS of different verbs in a particular place ("I can fly") and the resulting sentence will work. Thirdly, and most importantly for subsequent developments, Swain argued that output was META-linguistic; it provided talk ABOUT talk, and this gives us "higher ground" from which to survey language itself.

In 2000, Merrill Swain wrote an article for an OUP complilation on socio-cultural theory that was my (re-)introduction to Vygotsky. I'd read "Mind in Society" almost as soon as it came out, and I read Thought and Language in 1991, but I didn't really put either book together with language teaching until I read Merrill Swain's article "Beyond Output". In it, she rejected the whole information processing model of the mind (and with it the "communicative" idea of language as transferring thoughts). Instead, she put forward the idea that the mind is essentially MADE of language, and the learning is made of "languaging". In other words, the origins of the mind are never individual; the mind is made of social and cultural stuff at every single point of its development.

Since then there have been articles in Language Testing on formative assessment, in LTR on L1 use in pairs, and in Language Awareness on the use of the "ZPD" in teaching English articles. Everyone of these articles has been a kind of intellectual earthquake for me--even when I don't actually agree with what she's done (for example, I thought her article on the ZPD in teaching English articles confused the idea of "learning" with "development").

Now, she's a professor EMERITUS, which means she's probably retired. That means that this is really your last chance to learn from her. So what I propose is THIS. On Tuesday, we're going to Chung-ang University to attend HER class and to get her to FINALLY answer Jisu's question. She's speaking at 법학원 2 층 at five o'clock. Get there as soon as you can!

Bora, Seong-eun, Minkyeong! DON'T miss it this time!

dk 

[박성경]

Ok. Thanks for the great opportunity. I will be there by 5.

[Bora]

I see. Professor. I got the permission for leaving school earlier than usual. I will be there as soon as possible. Thank you.